O’Reilly and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly devoted part of Monday’s “The O’Reilly Factor” to a discussion of the incident in which two police officers pepper-sprayed a dozen protesters seated on a pathway, arms linked, protecting a handful of tents.

But Kelly and O’Reilly said the police may have been justified in using the chemical agent to clear away protesters.

“They just wanted to them to get out of there, to stop blocking what they were blocking, to scatter them,” Kelly said. “They wanted to get these people off the campus, but they didn’t want to lay hands on them.”

Kelly also said pepper spray “is a derivative of pepper; it is a food product, essentially.” She also suggested the spray may been been diluted.

But the images don’t look great, Kelly acknowledged.

“Listen, I know the tape looks bad, I agree it looks bad; all I am saying — from a legal standpoint — I don’t know that the cops did anything wrong,” she said. “The cops are allowed to use reasonable force to effect compliance with an arrest. It does look like these students were failing to disperse and, in some cases, were unlawfully assembling and perhaps even resisting arrest.

“It looks like these cops have room to argue that this was not excessive force,” she said.

O’Reilly then jumped in to say that he thought people should give police a break.

“I don’t think we have the right to Monday morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus,” he said.

O’Reilly said it was wrong to suggest that the cops hadn’t actually been in danger, as many have said.

“That’s what the cops say, so you have to give them the presumption of innocence as well,” O’Reilly said.